Oracle Open World 2019 was crazy for me this year. As you might have read in my schedule planning for OOW, I tried to attend quite a few sessions (unlike other years) and even managed to. I didn’t give up networking and meeting Oracle people, so it’s been quite busy.
Sessions
I started summarizing the sessions I attended and then realized it’s too much for a single post with all the other OOW stuff. So I split it to a different post specifically about the sessions.
Announcements
There were quite a few announcements at this OOW. Here are the three I find most interesting:
- One of the big announcements was the “Always Free Tier” of Oracle cloud. This means that you can create a cloud account and use some resource for free forever. This includes 2 autonomous databases with 1 OCPU and 2GB storage each (including APEX and lots of other things), 2 virtual machines with 1/8 OCPU and 1GB memory each, and some other resources like storage and network. For more information check https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free
- On the database side, Oracle 19c will be the last to support the non-cdb architecture. With this announcement they changed the database license so in 19c onward, each CDB is allowed to have 3 PDBs for free instead of 1 (more than 3 will requires the multitenant license)
- Oracle announced a partership with VMware to support VMware virtualized environments on Oracle Cloud
Community Stuff
As always I attended the Oracle ACE dinner on Sunday. I met some really good old friends and great new friends (both ACEs that I didn’t know and some new ACEs).
The groundbreaker hub this year was amazing and I spend a lot of time there. I got my own Oracle Code Card (which I hope will be with me at future conferences), took new professional head shots, had some beers, and more.
This year we also had a evening reception for user group leaders for the first time (in the past we had a luncheon). It was a lot of fun and it was great to see how many people are engaged with the community.
RAC Stuff
On Sunday I got invited to a RAC summit. This is a closed session of selected people with the team of RAC and MAA product managers. This is the first time I’ve attended this summit and it was an amazing experience. I talked a lot with the product managers, provided some feedback and raised some issues. I continued chatting with them during the conference and was very pleased to see how engaged they are with the clients and the users.
I especially would like to thank Markus Michalewicz and the entire team (Anil Nair, Pieter Van Puymbroeck, Ian Cookson, and the others).
Diagnostics Tools Stuff
During the conference I met Sandesh Rao for the first time face to face. He is the VP responsible for all kind of tool, including TFA, ORACHK and the others. He is also probably the person who take the highest number of selfies I know 🙂
Sandesh is a great guy and we chatted a lot about the diagnostics tools he’s responsible for and I provided some feedback (I had a few issues with some tools as you can see in this post). I will forward him all the feedback and he promised to check it out and fix whatever needs fix.
Optimizer Stuff
Another person I met face to face for the first time this year is Nigel Bayleiss. Nigel is the PM responsible for the database optimizer and it was a lot of fun to talk to him. I really wanted to understand the strange behavior I encountered earlier this year when I patched a production database so I managed to find Nigel in the exhibition hall and I think we talked for over an hour.
Nigel realized that the issue I had actually made sense. The bug I hit was introduced because of a new piece of code in the optimizer. Changing the OFE to 11.2 should disable the functionality of this new code, but it probably still executed it. The execution part was the root cause of the issue, so I had to set the parameters to prevent Oracle from running this code completely.
Other Stuff
That was only part of the experience this year. It seems that OOW this year was smaller, but it had great opportunities to meet people, attend all kind of receptions, join technical sessions and have some fun.
See you next year?